FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Someone reminded me of the Voidoids recently.
The big hits like "Love Comes In Spurts" are cool,
but how often do you hear this?

•   So many wonderful Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues to choose from this week! (Why not subscribe? It's cheap!) But I can't go giving away the store, so here are two: one on the latest round of police excuses for killing unarmed black men, and another taking you through a day in the life of J.D. Vance, who has been preparing for his Ohio Senate run by becoming more fascist. His most recent goosestep is the punishment by legislation of corporations that don't overtly support rightwing talking points. I mean, get a load of this:

When you're too authoritarian for David French... well, you're mainstream Republican these days, I guess.  

•   At the Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg's "The ‘cancel culture’ wars are exhausting and useless. Here are five proposals for a truce" is as doomed to failure as any other proposed truce in this space, notwithstanding we may presume better faith on her part that that of recent trans-truce floater Andrew Sullivan. For one thing, how can I sign a truce that I have no power to effect? Take, for example, her suggestion that "liberals should agree it’s good for troublesome works to be available, while conservatives should accept context and content labels":

Keeping works in print and available in digital libraries would undercut complaints about censorship. A school might decide not to use certain Dr. Seuss books, but parents could still seek them out. 

I already think "it’s good for troublesome works to be available." I'm troublesome as fuck, myself. But Seuss Enterprises doesn't want to put out the books I suppose Rosenberg is talking about, and they own the books. Similarly, National Review doesn't want to publish my columns. That's capitalism, comrade! 

I do approve of her first proposal: "make it harder for skittish employers to fire or blackball people over their political views." But as I keep saying over and over again, you can't do that with attitude and "standards" -- you can only do that by making laws that actually protect employee speech, which probably means no more "at-will" employment. And there's one whole side of this "truce" that won't go for that.